Better Naito, shown here during its launch back in May, has been a big success. Its biggest supporters have been PBOT staff and elected officials. So, why take it down?(Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Two of Portland’s transportation reform advocacy groups are ratcheting up their opposition to the City of Portland’s plans to tear down the Better Naito project at the end of next week.

“Better Naito is a critical link in the active transportation network and should remain installed year-round.”— Bike Loud PDX

Nearing the end of its fourth year as a temporary reconfiguration of Naito Parkway, the project gives walkers and rollers much more room to operate on a crucial north-south link along Waterfront Park.

Both Bike Loud PDX — the grassroots, all-volunteer group that celebrated its fourth birthday this week — and the venerable Street Trust (formerly the Bicycle Transportation Alliance), have taken action to save the project.

“Better Naito is a critical link in the active transportation network and should remain installed year-round… Spending time and resources each year to remove and re-install Better Naito is a poor use of our limited transportation funds. The $350,000 approved by City Council in 2017 gets chipped away at each year at the expense of maintenance or other projects. It is counter intuitive that at the same time we are seeking major investments to improve our active transportation network in the downtown core that we are spending funding to remove part of that network each fall…

By 2035, we are planning on 80% of commute trips to or from the district being made outside of Single Occupancy Vehicles (as adopted by the Central City 2035 Plan.) We will not be able to create these shifts in how Portlanders get around if we continue to remove the most popular Central City bike route each year.

BikeLoudPDX urges the City of Portland to keep Better Naito installed year round until a permanent design can be implemented… A year round installation would provide real data on winter usage and travel impacts to all modes that can be used to inform a decision on the permanent design.”

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Over 100 people stood in the middle of Naito during a protest against its removal last year.(Photo: Better Block PDX)

Bike Loud points to a 2017 PBOT traffic study that showed people were twice as likely to ride a bike on Better Naito than on the crowded Waterfront Park path. The city’s bike count also showed 3,000 – 4,000 bike trips per day on Naito at Ankeny and Salmon, “making it by far the most heavily used bicycle facility in the Central City,” Bike Loud notes.

“The Better Naito protected bikeway season will end September 22. Show your appreciation for this safe and convenient route! Meet up at 5 p.m. At 5:30 ride the length of the protected bikeway, then head over the Hawthorne Bridge to the Central City in Motion open house at OMSI where you can share your priorities for bike and pedestrian improvements with PBOT. Priorities like a permanent protected bikeway on SW Naito Parkway!”

This past May, Mayor Wheeler expressed his desire to permanently reconfigure Naito by commissioning a study on the potential design options and costs. The price tag came out to $4 million and the proposal has become project 17 of the Central City in Motion plan. Similar to the position of Bike Loud PDX this week, Better Block (the group that initiated the Better Naito concept in 2015) and other activists panned the study and said waiting for such a large project to materialize didn’t make sense when a good solution has already been tested.

At this point it’s unclear what the immediate future of Better Naito is. Current PBOT Commissioner Chloe Eudaly is new to the job of overseeing the bureau and isn’t prepared to comment on it yet. PBOT is unlikely to make such a major policy shift without cover from City Hall — especially as long as the Portland Business Alliance remains on record as being staunchly opposed to it.

NOTE: We love your comments and work hard to ensure they are productive, considerate, and welcoming of all perspectives. Disagreements are encouraged, but only if done with tact and respect. If you see a mean or inappropriate comment, please contact us and we'll take a look at it right away. Also, if you comment frequently, please consider holding your thoughts so that others can step forward. Thank you — Jonathan

One of the problems is that, as in the picture, it gives people, like the lady in the recumbent, even less of an excuse to KEEP RIGHT ! You (generic/royal _you_, mind) are not the only person on the planet.. There is always ALWAYS someone coming up from behind you who is moving faster than you are & you are not in England; did your elementary school teachers not drill into your head “single file, keep right”? jbfc

Maybe she just passed the orange bikes behind her and is moving over. Maybe she’s moving out to pass someone in front of her. Maybe she’s moving over a bit because the photographer looks like they may be about to move towards her. Maybe she’s avoiding some glass or gravel.

Maybe she thinks she IS over far enough. Maybe she IS from England. Maybe she hadn’t realized she should stay to the right, and someone who just passed her told her, and she’s moving over already. Maybe there’s a pigeon or squirrel in the lane.

Or, maybe she’s excited, and not realizing she could be a bit further over, and she’s delaying someone behind her, thus robbing them of two seconds out of their lives that they’ll NEVER get back!

I did not say anything about being in a hurry… We all ride at the speed we’re able… & inevitably there are those in front going slower & those behind going faster. I’m rarely the one doing the passing & I fail to see any reason to constipate the flow of traffic for others due to a complete lack of an awareness that there are actually other people on the planet (who would also like to get where they’re going while dealing with a minimum number of obstacles)…

Do you really think that the fact that someone is riding so that others can’t easily pass them on the left shows that they have “a complete lack of an awareness that there are actually other people on the planet”?

Yes, yes I do, I’ve decades of evidence supporting the belief that most people are generally clueless of how their actions affect others most of the time; & as an optimist, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt & believe that they _aren’t_ doing it on purpose… Elsewise, that they’d purposely make others’ lives just that wee little bit more difficult/unpleasant for, what, fun? that’d make them a particularly unpleasant type of ass.

That reminds me of the only time someone riding a bike really erupted on me. I was walking my dog at night on a park path. Guy on bike was approaching me from behind. I’d already seen him but he didn’t realize it. Instead of stepping towards the side of the trail I was closest to so he could pass easily, I stepped the other way, because my dog was over there in the bushes at the other edge of the path, and I didn’t want to pull my dog across the path because that would take longer.

So he yells, “And OF COURSE you step right into my path!” and reamed me out further from there, even though I was clear of his path well before he got there. I’m sure he never did see my dog, and assumed I was “generally clueless” as you assume people are. So I became just one more piece of evidence to prove his world view.

Unlike driving, riding a bicycle is fun, physically engaging and is more than just traveling from point to point in the least amount of time. If someone is enjoying themselves, they are fulfilling the purpose of the bike lane. If they are temporarily slowing other people down either from lack of awareness or being new to using bike lanes it doesn’t matter. If there is one thing that doesn’t belong in bike lanes, it’s car culture.

that was the celebratory kick off ride for the opening of better naito, not a commute. it’s fascinating how judgmental some are about other people cycling. perhaps instead of complaining about those who are in a small way humanizing transportation we should focus more ire on those who unnecessarily spew pollution and threaten the safety of our neighbors (in aggregate).

If you look closely, you’ll notice that there aren’t any striping lines. Perhaps with a better, more permanent design we (generic/royal_we_) can throw down some strategic paint and help people understand which side of the lane to ride on. Otherwise, Better Naito is pretty fantastic!

I ride 6th north and Broadway south too, haven’t bothered to try Better Naito yet for the same reasons you state. I’m not particularly opposed to Better Naito, but I’d much rather have the updated Broadway/4th couplet outlined by Central City In Motion, and if they’re prioritizing projects I think the permanent version of Better Naito is way lower on the list. It shunts cyclists out of the center of downtown, covers less north-south distance, and the user base heavily overlaps with the nearby Esplanade.

In contrast, Broadway/4th connects PSU and OHSU (two of the largest endpoints for bike commuters across the metro area) with five bridges and the densest part of the city. You want Portland to be an amazing bike city, build that. Better Naito = Boring.

Better Naito is partly a band-aid for the use of Waterfront Park as a perennial festival ground, and partly a safety valve for getting the meatheads off the path along off the seawall. Nope, not scenic. But saying we don’t need bike routes a quarter mile apart is like saying we should rip out Barbur Boulevard because I-5.

If you said don’t spend money on Naito because there are no sidewalks someplace in the East side that’s a different thing entirely.

I’m saying that, given PBOT’s request that the public offers them feedback on the projects outlined for the CCIM plan (as mentioned on BikePortland and listed here: https://centralcityinmotion.com/#/projects), and given that they’ve said they will only have the budget to implement a small subset of them in the short term, I would not pick Better Naito to add to that short list. Many of the other projects are much more important, but Better Naito has been much more publicized because there’s a temporary implementation of it to look at.

Regular bike commuters are already doing what you could call a “Better Broadway” project every day – the bike lane on Broadway is constantly blocked by poorly parked cars, Uber/Lyft drivers, and trucks/buses turning right across it without yielding, so in order to ride it you have to be the plastic wand yourself and hang out in the lane. Broadway is also home to one of the most dangerous intersections in town currently, as reported here: https://bikeportland.org/2018/06/04/right-hook-injures-bike-rider-at-nw-broadway-and-hoyt-again-282887

There are a lot of other projects on that list which look fantastic, like improving MLK/Grand and SE 7th; that, along with the rest of the greenway enhancement to NE 7th, would make cycling the undisputed best way to travel north-south through the entirety of Portland. Projects like that are exciting, and since the City says they can’t do everything in the next 5 years I’d rather have the things that would encourage the most people to make getting around via bike a way of life. I don’t think a permanent Better Naito would accomplish that nearly as well as the other projects would.

While I was at my previous company, I drove nearly daily (riding over Riverview Cemetery and through Lake Oswego into Tigard isn’t really feasible for a daily commute, and the public transit options were a joke), and spent time going both directions on Naito every day. Better Naito made almost no difference to my transit time. Neither did the southbound lane closure. A study by PBOT, per https://bikeportland.org/2018/05/24/mayor-wheeler-moves-permanent-better-naito-talks-forward-282155, showed a 90 second increase in transit time during peak hours. That’s a trivial amount of time, especially given the delays faced by drivers elsewhere.

There will always be someone who gets mad whenever a change is made to just about anything. They’ll post about it anonymously on some corner of the internet or complain to their bartender. Then they’ll get over it and adapt. Letting that paralyze change for the common good is absurd.

As the others said, southbound Naito is garbage for cycling. It might work if there were no bridge access to or from Naito, but the Steel Bridge and especially Morrison bridge make it horrible. Even if those onramps and offramps were closed, it still wouldn’t be as good as Better Naito.

Regarding the PBA, dialogue with them just allows them to take time to put monkeywrenches into the process. They have never and will never be on the side of those who want to make Portland more livable and vibrant.

You talk about needing dialog and working together, but at the same time you make sweeping generalizations about what drivers think (they seem to be a block group uniformly angry about Better Naito to you) and you talk about the two groups needing to meet, as if people either drive or bike.

You haven’t responded to evidence in that drivers DO like Better Naito, namely the fact that so many people ride bikes there–unless you believe that nobody who bikes also drives.

I’m a driver, and I love Better Naito, for similar reasons that I’d guess many people who bike there like it. Plus–and this is one that many drivers who do not bike might agree with–100% of people biking there are not in cars clogging up Naito or any other street.

Thank you for this comment. A lot of the time for me, I can have an experience with a really pissed off driver, and it ruins my enjoyment of biking in Portland,but 95% of the time people are pretty nice. It helps to remember to look at it that way.

I ride Better Naito every day and haven’t experienced any angry drivers. I actually have more unpleasant encounters with motorists on the neighborhood greenways.

And this idea that we can solve the urban mobility challenges by finding space for cyclists (and pedestrians and transit users) without taking away space to private motorists is not realistic. It’s a geometry question.

Lastly, saying that Better Naito is unnecessary because cyclists can ride on the park would be like saying allowing automobiles on Naito Parkway is unnecessary because they can drive on 1st and 2nd avenue.

“Lastly, saying that Better Naito is unnecessary because cyclists can ride on the park would be like saying allowing automobiles on Naito Parkway is unnecessary because they can drive on 1st and 2nd avenue.”

I think this is why we struggle. We try to make analogies like this that are not accurate, imho, and it just causes arguments instead of seeking solutions.

I bike Naito or the waterfront northbound in the AM (south in PM) 5x a week. I have always thought the options were great and safe. I was honestly surprised when I heard about “better Naito”.

Personally, the southbound bike lane of Naito freaks me out. It’s in the door zone and mixes often with cars turning right. I’ve had too many close calls with people in a rush to turn and not seeing me.

before I started taking the top of the Steel Bridge and using 3rd, I had a lot of close calls and one right hook on southbound Naito a couple of years ago. got away with a broken brake lever and some minor road rash, but yeah, not real great for cyclists.

In the face of cyclists, biketowners , and scooterers the old timers at the PBA are like an aged punch drunk fighter on the ropes, it is time to deliver them a knockout punch that sends them in to retirement from expressing their Neolithic views on transportation.

From the merriam webster dictionary, one of its several definitions for Neolithic. “belonging to an earlier age and now outmoded.” This seems perfectly accurate and polite given the state of the world today. Future generations will wonder why we bobbled about at this crucial juncture in time instead of slapping the knuckle-draggers aside and doing what it will take to save our species on this ” pale blue dot” upon which we live. We didn’t have dialogue when it was time to get lead out of paint in kids nurseries, or time to stop lobotomies and electroshock treatment in mental hospitals, or time to stop flushing our sewage straight in to the river, we just did and kicked the people who still wanted these stupid things out of the way.

PBA transportation committee is stacked with parking and freight interests. I think the right approach is for active transportation people to advocate for freight/bus only lanes. This might crack the carhead at PBA.

No offense but you just sound naive. We don’t need to be facilitating any sort of dialogue with the retrograde PBA, who have already done terrible damage to our city over the years. In doing so we’d be doing them a favor by adding a veneer of legitimacy to their reactionary agenda. They should simply be marginalized by a future Mayor not named Ted Wheeler, a mayor who wins election in 2020 by promoting a platform centered squarely on climate change, with policies generally radiating outward from that single-minded focus (hello, stopping the expansion of I-5). Wheeler is vulnerable. We should be going for the electoral jugular so we can put an end to the last 13 years –13 critical years– of stagnation.

PS another thing about the PBA: they’ve become extra-superfluous with the rapid growth of Business for a Better Portland.

This is a great resource that should remain year-round! I ride it twice daily, and it easily shaves at least 5 minutes off the commute in each direction. I can also ride faster on it because i don’t have to dodge tourists and bollards. It’s safer for everyone, right? Even though I ride at off-peak times I find it always busy, but still WAY faster than the waterfront.

Exactly right. In case anyone is offering the waterfront path as a facility for bike travelers, as opposed to people recreating, it has objective hazards that would be unheard of on a automobile route. It’s got massive bollards that block lines of travel, with no energy absorbing features, and about a hundred blind spots that could easily be hiding a small child.

That is not a hypothetical, if I hadn’t been riding a mellow pace on a bike with excellent brakes, and my hands on the levers, I could have killed a 3-year old? who ran across to rejoin his family on the other side of the path. If there’s a blind spot, there’s a person in it.

I’m incredulous about the number of bike riders dicing on the waterfront. I still use that route when I’m not in a hurry, you’ll know me, I’m the person going 8 mph ‘on your line’. Needless to say I’m watching for suspect family groups with no child in sight.

I like Better Naito and think it would be good to implement long-term. What about this treatment on the Burnside bridge, NE Broadway, etc….I feel these would be even better locations.

I wonder if in the “off-season” if it would be worse or better, to turn the right hand lane into parking and creating a protected bike lane. My thinking is worse because of the feedback when parking is then removed. However if it’s parking then the complaint from cars about cars would be interesting.

on my ride last night I saw 20 wands already removed, looked like they are getting a nice early headstart on disassembly. it was fine while it lasted, I guess, but honestly, I saw so much abuse of the “facility” and misuse by motor vehicles of all kinds (multiple streetcleaner trucks using it as a fillup station, even an 18 wheeler coming into the bikelane off of Washington. epic, indeed)

I am looking forward to its removal. I find that I prefer the old formation of my tiny gutter bikelane full of sunken drains.

Where does that number come from? Are you saying Better Naito costs $4,000,000 to put up, or take down? That might be a real number for a permanent protected bike lane from Harrison up to the Steel Bridge. It doesn’t sound right for striping and plastic wands.

The CCIM rendering shows it as a planting strip between the NB and SB auto lanes, and then a concrete curb separating the NB auto lane from the 2-way cycle track. $4M seems entirely reasonable for that much work.